Apollo Daughter
by GS Girl
Summary: Her knees shake. Her head feels like its splitting open. Shes weak and trembling with fright and exhaustion. Hanna wants to lie down and cry but intead, she staggers down into the woods towards the lights of the farmhouse. She can hear children shouting happily and music playing can be heard in the distance.
1. Chapter 1

She reached the top of the hill and caught her breath. How long since she'd last killed them? Maybe two hours. They never seemed to stay dead longer than that.

The past few days, she'd hardly slept. She'd eaten whatever she could scrounge-vending machine gummi bears, stale bagels, even a Jack in the Crack burrito, which was a new personal low. Her clothes were torn, burned, and splattered with monster slime.

Where to run?

She scanned her surroundings. Under different circumstances, she might've enjoyed the view. To her left, grass covered hills rolled inland, dotted with lakes, woods, and a few herds of cows. A forest of White House Christmas tree-sized pines started several hundred feet to her right. To her left, the flatlands of Albany and Pensilvania marched west-a vast checkerboard of neighborhoods, with several thousand people who probably did not want their night interrupted by two - no one - monster(s).

The wind changed. Hanna caught the sour scent of barn yard animal. A hundred yards down the slope, something rustled through the woods-snapping branches, crunching leaves.

Chimeras.

Glancing back, she got her first clear look at the monster. It was seven feet tall, easy, his arms and legs like something from the cover of Muscle Man magazine-bulging biceps and triceps and a bunch of other 'ceps, all stuffed like baseballs under vein-webbed skin. It had a tail of a snake, legs of a goat, and paws of a lion.

His neck was a mass of muscle and orange fur leading up to his enormous heads. Yes plural. One head belonged to a donkey and the other belonged to an african lion. It had had a snout as long as an arm, snotty nostrils, cruel red eyes, and razor sharp teeth that looked like they belonged to a shark.

For the millionth time, Hanna wished their noses wasn't so good. They had always said they could smell her because she was a demigod-the half-blood daughter of some god. Hanna had tried rolling in mud, splashing through creeks, even keeping air-freshener sticks in his pockets so she'd have that new car smell; but apparently demigod stink was hard to mask.

The pine trees were still too far away-a hundred yards uphill at least. She couldn't place her finger on it but Hanna felt like the forest was the safest place in the entire world.

Right next to her, a familiar voice jolted her back to the present: "There you are!"

Hanna stumbled away from the Chimera, almost tumbling down the hill.

It was the goat head-Ctesias.

The other head - Anphen - turned toward Hanna and bared his fangs. The monsters red eyes bored into Hanna.

Down the other side of the hill Hanna could see the lights of a farmhouse glowing yellow in the dark sky. But that was half a mile away. She'd never make it.

The Chemeras grunted, pawing the ground. Hanna had an idea-a stupid idea, but better than no idea at all. She centered her weight and gave the monster the finger.

"Raaaarrrrr!" The monster pawed the ground and snorted. Flames flew out of his nostrils. He charged.

Time slowed down. Her legs tensed. She couldn't jump sideways, so she leaped straight up, kicking off from the creature's head, using it as a springboard, turning in midair, and landing on his neck. Hanna wondered why she cold do that? She didn't have time to figure it out.

A millisecond later, the monster halted startled. The Chemera bucked around, trying to shake the girl on his back. She locked her arms around its thick neck to keep from being thrown. The smell of rotten meat burned her nostrils. The monster shook himself around and bucked like a rodeo bull. Hanna wanted to scream, but the ways she was getting tossed around, if she opened her mouth she'd bite her tongue off.

At this point the Chemera had run so far with he girl on its back that it had reached the edge of the woods. Suddenly, a flash of light, and rage filled Hanna like high-octane fuel. She got both hands around one of the goats horns and pulled backward with all her might. The monster tensed, gave a surprised grunt, then-snap!

The animal screamed and flung Hanna through the air. She landed flat on her back in the woods. Her head smacked against a tree. When She sat up, her vision was blurry. She was still holding the horn.

The monster charged. Without thinking, Hanna rolled to one side and came up kneeling. As the monster barreled past, she drove the broken horn straight into his side, right up under his furry rib cage. The monster howled and bleated in agony. He flailed, clawing at his chest, then began to disintegrate- like crumbling sand, blown away in chunks by the wind.

The monster was gone. She smelled like livestock and her knees were shaking. Her head felt like it was splitting open. She was weak and trembling with fright and exhaustion. Hanna wanted to lie down and cry. Instead she staggered down into the woods, toward the lights of the farmhouse. She staggered forward and fought the urge pass out. The sound of children shouting and music playing can be heard in the distance. Hanna trudges toward the sound.

The last thing Hanna remembered was collapsing on stone steps, looking down into a pit of a hundred curious and concerned faces yellow in the light of the bonfire. Hanna looked up at the worried faces of a black haired boy and a pretty girl, her blond hair curled like a princess's. That's when she passed out.


	2. Chapter 2 - WELCOME TO CAMP 12 BLOOD

**CHAPTER 2 - WELCOME TO CAMP 1/2 BLOOD**

* * *

"I can't believe I messed up again."

"At least she's alive. Look, lets focus on our bigger problem. If she's really the child mentioned in the prophecy,"

I wake to the sound of hushed voices. I rub my eyes and grunt as I stretch.

"You don't look tuff enough to kill a Chimera."

A girl stands at the foot of my bed. Shes probably my age, maybe a couple of inches taller, and a whole lot more athletic looking. With her deep tan and her curly blond hair, she was almost exactly what I thought a stereotypical California girl would look like, except her eyes ruined the image. They were startling gray, like storm clouds; pretty, but intimidating, too, as if she were analyzing the best way to take me down in a fight. He wears an orange shirt that reads CHB and blue jeans.

Next to her stands a boy with shaggy black hair and deep sea green eyes. He's several inches taller than the girl and looks like a skate-border. Minus the bronze armor strapped to his chest.

"You had us worried." says the boy concerned.

I lick my lips and struggle to sit upright. I wince and clutch my side. Underneath my shirt an ace bandage is wrapped skillfully around my torso. I looks around bewildered.

"Where...where am I? What is this place?" I stammer confused.

"The infirmary. You've been unconscious for three days."

"Three days!"

The blond haired girl rolls her eyes and sighs. She grabs a golden goblet from a nearby medical cart, fills it with a liquid, and takes a seat on the side of my cot. "Drink this." she says in a soft demanding voice "It'll make you feel better."

I look at the girl quiescently and hesitantly accept the goblet. I spare the two teenagers a wary glance before taking a sip.

I recoil at the taste, because I was expecting apple juice. It wasn't that at all. It was chocolate-chip cookies. Liquid cookies. Buttery and hot, with the chips still melting. Drinking it, my whole body felt warm and good, full of energy. Before I knew it, I'd drained the glass. I stared into it, sure I'd just had a warm drink, but the ice cubes hadn't even melted.

"Was it good?"

I nod.

"What did it taste like?" He sounds so wistful, I feel guilty.

"Chocolate-chip cookies," I say.

He smirks. "How do you feel?"

"Like I could throw Nancy Bobofit a hundred yards."

"That's good," he says. "That's good."

The girl takes the empty glass from me gingerly, and sets it back on the table.

"I don't think you could risk drinking any more of that stuff."

"What do you mean?"

"Come on." interrupts the boy. "Chiron and Mr. D are waiting."

I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up. my legs feel wobbly but I manage to follow the two teenagers.

As we come around the opposite end of the house, I catch my breath.

The landscape is dotted with buildings that looked like ancient Greek architecture-an open-air pavilion, an amphitheater, a circular arena-except that they all looked brand new, their white marble columns sparkling in the sun. In a nearby sandpit, a dozen high school-age kids play volleyball. Canoes glided across a small lake. Kids in bright orange T-shirts like Percy's ... _[who introduced himself and Anabeth to me] _... chase each other around a cluster of cabins nestled in the woods. Some shoot targets at an archery range. Others ride horses down a wooded trail, and, unless I was hallucinating, some of their horses have wings.

Down at the end of the porch, two men sit across from each other at a card table.

The man facing me is small, but porky. He has a red nose, big watery eyes, and curly hair so black it was almost purple. He looked like a baby angel who'd turned middle-aged in a trailer park.

"That's Mr. D," Percy murmurs to me. "He's the camp director. Be polite and, try not to punch him." He then points at a guy whose back is to me. "And that is Chiron."

The man on horseback. Except he wasn't on horseback-he was part of the horse. From the waist up he was human, with curly brown hair and a well-trimmed beard. He wore a T-shirt that said Worlds Best Centaur, and had a quiver and bow strapped to his back. His head was so high up he had to kneel to avoid the porch lights, because from the waist down, he was a white stallion.

I stop dead in my tracks.

"Oh. My. God." I mutter staring wide eyed at the director.

The director snorts and both of the teenagers smirk, clearly amused.

"And Mr. D ... does that stand for something?"

"Ya, Dionysus." Chuckles the brown headed boy.

I look at Percy like he just grew a second head.

"Wait. Like the Greek god?"

Anabeth cracks a smile. "You catch on fast."

"Wait, you're telling me there's such a thing as God."

"Well, now," Chiron said. "God-capital G, God. That's a different matter altogether. We shan't deal with the metaphysical."

"Metaphysical? But you were just talking about-"

"Ah, gods, plural, as in, great beings that control the forces of nature and human endeavors: the immortal gods of Olympus. That's a smaller matter."

"Smaller?"

"Yes, quite."

"Zeus," I said. "Hera. Apollo. You mean them."

Distant thunder on a cloudless day.

"Young Lady," says Mr. D, "I would really be less casual about throwing those names around, if I were you.

"But they're stories," I said. "They're-myths, to explain lightning and the seasons and stuff. They're what people believed before there was science."

Percy snorts. "That's what I said when I first came here." he wispers to Anabeth.

"Science!" Mr. D scoffed. "And tell me, child what will people think of your 'science' two thousand years from now?" Mr. D continued. "Hmm? They will call it primitive mumbo jumbo. That's what. Oh, I love mortals-they have absolutely no sense of perspective. They think they've come so-o-o far. And have they, Chiron? Look at this child and tell me."

I wasn't liking Mr. D much, but there was something about the way he called me mortal, as if... he wasn't.

"Hanna," Chiron says, "you may choose to believe or not, but the fact is that immortal means immortal. Can you imagine that for a moment, never dying? Never fading? Existing, just as you are, for all time?"

I was about to answer, off the top of my head, that it sounded like a pretty good deal, but the tone of Chiron's voice made me hesitate.

"You mean, whether people believed in you or not," I say.

"Exactly," Chiron agrees.

"If you were a god, how would you like being called a myth, an old story to explain lightning?" prods Mr.D. "What if I told you, that someday people would call you a myth, just created to explain how little girls shouldn't run away?"

My face feels like its been hit by ice water. My skin feels like its been rubbed with ice cubes. He couldn't possibly know about that. Could he?

I ball me hands into fists and clench my teeth together. He was trying to make me angry for some reason, but I wasn't going to let him. I said, "I wouldn't like it. But I don't believe in gods."

"Oh, you'd better," Mr. D murmured. "Before one of them incinerates you."

He waves his hand and a goblet appeared on the table, as if the sunlight had bent, momentarily, and woven the air into glass. The goblet filled itself with red wine.

My jaw drops, but Chiron hardly looks up.

"Mr. D," he warns, "your restrictions."

Mr. D looks at the wine and feigns surprise.

"Dear me." He looks at the sky and yells, "Old habits! Sorry!"

More thunder.

Mr. D waves his hand again, and the wineglass changes into a fresh can of Diet Coke. He sighs unhappily, pops the top of the soda, and goes back to his card game.

Chiron winks at me. "Mr. D offended his father a while back, took a fancy to a wood nymph who had been declared off-limits."

"A wood nymph," I repeat, still staring at the Diet Coke can like it was from outer space.

"Yes," Mr. D confesses. "Father loves to punish me. The first time, Prohibition. Ghastly! Absolutely horrid ten years! The second time-well, she really was pretty, and I couldn't stay away-the second time, he sent me here. HalfBlood Hill. Summer camp for brats like you. 'Be a better influence,' he told me. 'Work with youths rather than tearing them down.' Ha! Absolutely unfair."

Mr. D sounds about six years old, like a pouting little kid.

"And ..." I stammer, "your father is ..."

"Di immortales, Chiron," Mr. D exclaimed. My father is Zeus, of course."

I run through D names from Greek mythology. Wine. The skin of a tiger.

"You're Dionysus," I said. "The god of wine."

"Duh! Did you think I was Aphrodite, perhaps?"

"You're a god."

"Yes, child."

"A god. You."

He turns to looks at me straight on, and I see a kind of purplish fire in his eyes, a hint that this whiny, plump little man was only showing me the tiniest bit of his true nature. I see visions of grape vines choking unbelievers to death, drunken warriors insane with battle lust, sailors screaming as their hands turned to flippers, their faces elongating into dolphin snouts. I know that if I push him, Mr. D would show me worse things. He would plant a disease in my brain that would leave me wearing a straitjacket in a rubber room for the rest of my life.

"Would you like to test me, child?" he says quietly.

"No. No, sir."

The fire dies a little. He turns back to his card game. "I believe I win."

"Percy, Anabeth, why don't you two show Hanna around. I'm sure she has plenty of questions. Maybe you can help her find some answers."

"Ya, sure Chiron." Percy and Anabeth say unanimously.

* * *

We walk through the strawberry fields, where campers pick bushels of berries while satyrs play a tune on a reed pipe.

Percy tells me the camp grows a nice crop for export to New York restaurants and Mount Olympus. "It pays our expenses," he explains. "And the strawberries take almost no effort."

He says Mr. D has this effect on fruit-bearing plants: they just go crazy when he's around. It works best with wine grapes, but Mr. D was restricted from growing those, so they grow strawberries instead.

On the central green, a group of campers play basketball. They were incredible shots. Nothing bounced off the rim. Three-pointers went in automatically.

"Apollo's cabin," Annabeth explains. "Bunch of show-offs with missile weapons-arrows, basketballs."

They walk past a central fire pit, where two guys are hacking at each other with swords.

"Real blades?" I note. "Isn't that dangerous?"

"That's sort of the point," Annabeth says. "Uh, sorry. Bad pun. That's my cabin over there. Number Six." She nodds to a gray building with a carved owl over the door. Through the open doorway, I can see bookshelves, weapon displays, and one of those computerized SMART Boards they have in classrooms. Two girls draw a map that looks like a battle diagram.

"Speaking of blades," Percy says, "come here."

He leads me around the side of the cabin, to a big metal shed that looks like its meant for gardening tools. Annabeth unlocks it, and inside are not gardening tools, unless you wanted to make war on your tomato plants. The shed is lined with all sorts of weapons-from swords to spears to clubs.

"Every demigod needs a weapon," Annabeth says. "Hephaestus makes the best, but we have a pretty good selection, too. Athena's all about strategy-matching the right weapon to the right person. Let's see..."

I don't feel much like shopping for deadly objects, but I know Annabeth is trying to do something nice for me so I play along.

Annabeth hands me a massive sword, which I can hardly lift.

"No," they both say at once.

Percy rummages a little farther in the shed and brings out something else. "A shotgun?" I ask.

"Mossberg 500." Annabeth checks the pump action like it was no big deal. "Don't worry. It doesn't hurt humans. It's modified to shoot Celestial bronze, so it only kills monsters."

"Urn, I don't think that's my style," I say.

"Mmm, yeah," Annabeth agrees. "Too flashy."

She puts the shotgun back and starts poking through a rack of crossbows.

Annabeth digs one out and blows the dust off the wood. The wood is smooth, bleached white from years in the sun. Nothing fancy. The polished wood handle fit beautifully in my hand. When when I pull the string back, the woods bends easily. On the belly of the bow is a small engraving of a griffin.

"It suits you," Percy admits. "That kind of bow is called a flat-bow. It was mostly frowned upon as a war weapon due to the fact that it's only good during far rang combat. But in a fight, it could protect you just fine."

Finally, they show me the cabins. There are twelve of them, nestled in the woods by the lake. They'er arranged in a U, with two at the base and five in a row on either side. And they're without doubt the most bizarre collection of buildings I'd ever seen.

Except for the fact that each has a large brass number above the door (odds on the left side, evens on the right), they look absolutely nothing alike. Number nine has smokestacks, like a tiny factory. Number four has tomato vines on the walls and a roof made out of real grass. Seven seems to be made of solid gold, which gleams so much in the sunlight it was almost impossible to look at. They all face a commons area about the size of a soccer field, dotted with Greek statues, fountains, flower beds, and a couple of basketball hoops (which are more my speed).

In the center of the field is a huge stone-lined firepit. Even though it's a warm afternoon, the hearth smoldered. A girl about nine years old tends the flames, poking the coals with a stick.

The pair of cabins at the head of the field, numbers one and two, look like his-and-hers mausoleums, big white marble boxes with heavy columns in front. Cabin one is the biggest and bulkiest of the twelve. Its polished bronze doors shimmer like a hologram, so that from different angles lightning bolts seemed to streak across them. Cabin two is more graceful somehow, with slimmer columns garlanded with pomegranates and flowers. The walls are carved with images of peacocks.

"Zeus and Hera?" I guess.

"Correct," Annabeth says.

"Their cabins look empty."

"Several of the cabins are. That's true. No one ever stays in one or two."

Okay. So each cabin had a different god, like a mascot.

Number five is bright red-a real nasty paint job, as if the color had been splashed on with buckets and fists. The roof was lined with barbed wire. A stuffed wild boar's head hangs over the doorway, and its eyes seem to follow me. Inside I spot a bunch of mean-looking kids, both girls and boys, arm wrestling and arguing with each other while rock music blares. The loudest is a girl maybe thirteen or fourteen. She wares a size XXXL CAMP HALFBLOOD T-shirt under a camouflage jacket. She zeros in on me and gives me an evil sneer.

Cabin Eight is entirely silver and glowed like moonlight. "Artemis?" I guess. "You know Greek mythology," Annabeth commends. "Artemis is goddess of the moon, goddess of hunting. But no campers. Artemis is an eternal maiden, so she doesn't have any kids."

"Well, there are the Hunters of Artemis," Annabeth adds. "They visit sometimes. They're not the children of Artemis, but they're her handmaidens-this band of immortal teenage girls who adventure together and hunt monsters and stuff."

I perk up. "That sounds cool. They get to be immortal?"

A conch horn blows in the distance. Campers starte putting away their weapons and projects. I hadn't realized it was getting so late, but the sun going down.

* * *

**COMMENT **

**FOLLOW **

**FAVORITE **


End file.
